


interruption

by bibliocratic



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Domesticity, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Past Eye Trauma, Lonely!Martin, M/M, Torture, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2021-01-21 14:00:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21300593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bibliocratic/pseuds/bibliocratic
Summary: They are happy, in their own way, after it all. Then one of the Hunt goes after Jon.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 15
Kudos: 343





	interruption

**Author's Note:**

> Definitely not canon compliant any more, but set in a divergent end of S4 where things from episode 154 onwards went differently. Cws in the tags, but I'll pop full details in the end notes.

She will admit she's disappointed. The work of months to find this place only half tethered to the rest of the world, miles out from a dozy northern town that never quite modernised; the path to reach here dried out into unkempt grass and bushy linings of thorned hedgerows. She had pushed through boughs still fat with summer fruits, stubby nails of plants scoring at the fabric of her clothes and leaving a breadcrumb trail of evidence over her trousers. She had caught the scent she'd been following downwind, tracing a trail left; a trudging walk that meanders past an old graveyard, the church long ruined and wind-whistle empty, the stones overturned by time and roots. A tall yew tree angled up to the sky, weighed down by poisonous berries, and she had scratched her nails into the bark as she passed to keep herself sharp.

So many contingencies, preparations, and she thinks of them all as she approaches the slate roofed cottage. A low stone wall encircles the perimeter, and she spends careful time sniffing around the entirety of it. Sure there will be some trap, something laid to ensnare the unwary.

The latch of the garden gate is sturdy but oiled and swings in like the hint of the autumn breeze. The pathway is swept empty of the fallen leaves that are beginning to brown and rot on some of the paths nearby. And she creeps up to the house, thinking through every possible scenario that could greet her, heartbeat elevated and her mouth curved into a contented smile at the heady sensation of it. Her teeth ache at the hope of a struggle, of a scuffle, of there being something she will need to conquer.

But the lock at the back door is dealt with easily and quietly, and nothing stops her when she slides over the threshold. There is the old smell of coffee, the hum of a fridge-freezer, and the heating has recently been turned off, taking the chill off the cool of the morning air.

In a moment she is standing in the open plan junction between the tidy, recently cleaned kitchen and the living room. Her elation at her success, of having been so smart, so sly, is giving way to unease then making room for frustration, disappointment, as she sees her quarry. Stops, watches him, shoulders loose, entirely unaware of her. He's sitting on the sofa, cross-legged, a sleeping cat moulded to his side. Typing on his laptop at a focused and steady pace. A man touched by a god, but in the end, a man left alone. Unprotected.

She listens to him mutter and hum as he works, every so often having the voice of the assisted reader repeat back his sentences to him; some dry academic that she dismisses with disinterest. Swaddled around him, a home dressed up with the paraphernalia of a lived-in life; photo-frames and books and dvds and just, just _meaningless_ detritus of a boring, mundane existence.

Impatience gets the better of her. The peaceable quiet of the house and its wild neighbourhood of rustling trees and sparks of bird calls, the snatch of a song he worries in a tuneless hum between his teeth before he puts something else into words, it infuriates her. Because this, _this_, was the Eye's choice? A man with his curved back to her, poor posture, the room mildly warm enough for him to have rolled up his shirt sleeves haphazardly, his skin bubbled with burns and scars and battles survived or won, and _this?_ A man lost to his research, every so often tucking his hair back out of his face, dark locks streaking overwhelming with a whitish grey, a man who has not _noticed_ her.

There's a growl stuck in her teeth.

He taps away, amending sentences for clarity, occasionally mindlessly scratching the cat behind the ears, and behind him, not three strides away she stands, feeling ignored and irritated, the coffee scent starting to get in her nose.

She had wanted him to be afraid. To be a challenge. He was meant to be something worthy. Something _meaty_.

Carefully, ever so precisely, she adjusts her weight and stance. Extends a long dirt-bitten claw and scrapes a long nail along the wall of the room. Scoring off flecks of plaster and paint, making a little deliberate screech of sound.

He jumps, startled and that, and that, that is satisfying. To watch the line of his body straighten, his face turning to her direction before moving this way and that.

“Hello?” he calls out, voice crusty with a disuse before he clears his throat, and smiling, she moves on careful feet to the other wall, and drags another longer tune down the paintwork.

This gets his attention.

“Hello?” he repeats, and she almost purrs to hear the tremor in the word. He's stopped typing. His back ramrod, all his ease evaporated. He strains his hearing, but she pads into the room, closer, soundless, practised in her craft, and he will hear nothing unless she lets him.

She is no longer disappointed. Because it can be a game now. Some fun, some _sport_.

Nearer the fireplace, further into the room, she allows him to hear a creak, pressure placed on wooden flooring at a weak join. He flinches again at the sound, and he's putting the laptop to the empty side next to him, cautiously moving to stand. She stalks closer at an indulgently slow pace, letting the tension of the moment unfurl, simmer, and there is a moment when his sightless gaze drags right over her as he tries to source the noise.

She stands an arms-width away, directly ahead of him, stood in front of her like a morsel twitching on a platter, his live-wire body straining to hear her.

“W-who is there?” he says, quieter, and his hands are beginning to tense into fists and he's holding himself as though ready to fight. Maybe someone taught him, because for all his arms are held sloppily, his feet are grounded. She is indulgent with herself, for all the hard work she's put into finding this den, stalks a semi-circle around where he stands and cannot perceive her, wondering how long she can drag this out. She fantasises about letting him escape, panicking him with a snarl and a snap of her jaws so he takes the wrong turnings, trips or falls, his breathing delirious with fright, playing with him for hours before she finally gets her claws in.

She can feel the giddy heat from his skin, the in and out of his chest beginning to panic, the throbbing twitch of his Adam's apple as he swallows.

He holds himself stock-still and she doesn't make a sound. Standing right before him, close enough to see the burrowed marks of the Corruption adorning his flesh. She raises hand up in an unkind mimicry of a caress, holds it a hairs-breadth from his face, as though making to cup his cheek, smiling at his obliviousness, at how near she's been able to get.

Oh and he looks right at her, through her, and it is a rush through her to be so unseen, to have her prey so close, his heart pounding so terribly fast. All that blood in him, boiling under his skin.

She smiles, teeth wide in her mouth, and wonders if she can get her mouth around his throat before he realises what is happening.

She breathes out, a half growl percolating in her throat. Wanting to watch his pulse jump again. Wanting him to be frightened. To run so she can finally finally chase.

The knife is a surprise. He digs into his pocket and slashes wildly; it is luck that he strikes and finds his target, the tip catching and splitting the skin of her cheek. She hisses and he staggers to the left and back, his face gone open with an oil-and-water mix of terror and anger, the blade held shaking in his grip as he readies to strike again.

It is nothing to dive at him. Knock the switch-blade wide and useless, barrel into him with a gleeful howl; the computer as they both land hard against the sofa clatters to the ground, squawks with a smash, the cat yowls and bolts, and the man cries out as his back slams unforgiving into the floor.

He fights dirty. And that is what she had wanted, _this_ was it; he yells and strains and tussles, scratching the side of her cheek with his blunt nails and irritating the wound already dripping before she can hold the wrist down, puncturing the skin with her talons. His legs flail, trying to bring his knees up but his socked feet failing to gain purchase. A few punches from her free hand, and he's almost dealt with – one nearly cracks his jaw, another one bursts his lip like an overripe balloon and the blood sprays out over the bottom of his face, and she gives him a third just to hear the sound split from his mouth.

He's a scrawny beast, ill-made for fighting and ill-used before she even laid hands on him, but he desperately strikes out with his feet, catching her in the jaw with a grunt, more from surprise than pain, and he wrenches himself into his front with a surge of energy, tries to drag himself forward and up, and it's a treat, it really is, to allow him a few faltering yards before she yanks him painfully back, to pinion his body with her weight.

“It's better if you don't struggle, archivist,” she says, capriciously joyful with the turn of events, and he thrashes and twitches like holding a man below water. He will not listen until she nearly breaks his arm wrenching it to the small of his back, the babbling pained cry echoing in the empty room, and it is _perfect_.

She has to bind him, of course. Curtail his movements, because despite his lack of strength, he continues to try and escape, wriggling and squirming like a creature caught by a barbed hook. She finds some materials in a cupboard draw in the kitchen, rolls of patterned ribbon used to adorn Christmas and birthday presents, packing sellotape and electrical tape. None of it seems sturdy enough for the task until she gets to a half used ball of jute string, employed to steady sun-greedy climbing plants that she had noticed stretching tall in the back garden as she made her way inside.

(the first time she leaves him alone, she comes back to find him trying to pull himself agonisingly over the rug, dripping blood across the floor like a snail-trail – he will only stay still when she picks up his knife – switch-blade, engraved down the side as though it has been a gift from someone treasured – and stabs it into the floorboards through the skin and ligament and muscle of his hand. His scream and sobbing as it goes in is almost as satisfying as when she pulls it out)

Now he has been pulled up to kneeling. The thin wine of the string scoring at his skin, a cruel rash already reddening, and it's tight enough to make his fingers start to discolour painfully. He trembles from the shock, sways half-woozy from the impact, and the blood sings muted in her skin and the high of capturing her prize is already coming down.

“I did think you'd be more of a challenge,” she says, allowing petulancy to drain into her words.

The archivist – who has a name now that he lives in more than his title, who has a pet, who has plants he diligently tends sprouting in the tough ground of the garden, who thought maybe he'd gotten away from all this – looks approximately in her direction. The gaze does not have the sheen she would have assumed, that she expects from those of the Beholding or of those in service to the Powers. The hunger. The gnawing, grating sort of drive they all share. Their fight has knocked off his dark glasses, revealing the price he paid for his freedom from his god.

At her feet, head hung low, blood coating the bottom part of his face like stage make-up, he's only a person now. Devotions run dry and turned heretic, he doesn't make a noise at her questions, and she doesn't like that, so she tugs at his hair to hear him yowl as his scalp burns. Better.

“Who else is in the house, archivist?” she asks again, and he shakes his head and she thinks about loosening his teeth if he's lying.

She swings anyway. It makes her feel better. His neck snaps back and she likes the noise he makes, the one he's trying to muffle in some misplaced display of bravery.

“You don't live here all alone,” she says, more as a confirmation than a question and as she does, she kneels down, angles his face to hers with a claw. She knows she has his entire attention, and there is a shiver of his old ways; his gaze, for all it sees nothing, radiates the sort of intensity of terror that she basks in like a sunlamp. “I looked at the photos on your wall when I came in. Sweet. Very domestic.”

He winces at that, and she grins. It flickers on her face like a starved candle. She presses her nails to his throat and draws a beaded choker across the skin, treading old and scarred ground, and she likes the starting sound of fear he makes.

“Where is he then?” she asks conversationally.

The man on his knees doesn't meet her eye. The pocked skin of his face is twisted into a useless defiance, poking through the terror like through the cloudy fabric of a sunny day, and she continues to smile, self-satisfied. Knowing they will have hours yet.

“I'll hunt him down too,” she gloats, wanting to see the expression that helplessly chases across his face, the one he tries to force into guttering even as it burns in him. “ Strip flesh from bone with my teeth. You can listen to the blood bubble up, and know it was you that did it, archivist.”

“I'm...” he starts, trying to salvage his words into something manageable. “I'm not the Archivist any more.”

“The Eye's favour has passed to another,” she agrees, and rakes her grubby nails down the line of his jaw, toying with him, enjoying how blood beads up as it splits, how he sucks in a terrified breath and quails but doesn't utter a sound. “But you're marked all the same. Others of my kin tried to hunt you down, only you got the better of them.” She runs the rough flat of a fingertip over a chunky scar that runs from earlobe to chin, an old and poorly healed rend that runs with a hair-line thin mark along the skin of his scalp, that he's combed hair over to hide. “And a hunter doesn't like leaving a job undone. It made you more of a challenge, you see. You're not protected by the Institute now.”

His pulse dances in his throat. She wants to chart it with her teeth.

“So where is the other one, archivist?” she asks again.

“You don't need anyone else,” he says, and she wonders if he knows how desperate he looks, how pitifully afraid, how little his words will change anything any more. “You've got me, I'm here, you caught me, y-you don't need him.”

“You aren't the only monster I wanted to track down today,” she replies. “And while a toothless, mewling former archivist _is_ a satisfying catch, I have the bonus advantage of standing in another Avatar's den. His chase will be far more of a challenge, I have no doubt.”

“He's not here,” he says, more firmly and with more bite than she would have expected, and he's not lying. She pushes him onto his back, his bound arms crushed beneath him, and he gasps, kicks with his untethered legs until she hunches over on all fours, forcing him still, bracketing him with her limbs. He can't see her teeth, so she makes a point of allowing them to graze the feverish skin of his throat, let him feel the harsh points of them.

“But you know where he will be,” she hums against his throat. She watches his jaw twitch, and his body is engorged with so much life and so much blood it's making it harder for her to keep her focus.

“I don't...” he begins, and she bites down, sudden, wetting her teeth with the flesh of his neck, and he cries out and arches his back in a thoughtless panic, impaling his skin tighter in her jaws. She shakes him a little, like a dog with a toy worrying in its clamped fangs, before releasing him.

“You're a poor liar, archivist,” she says, and he doesn't deny it. He says nothing more. His silence is not the defiance she wanted, but it's the one she's working with. It's not a physical tussle, a brawl between two people evenly matched, but it is a challenge, where one party will eventually yield to the other.

“Are you going to tell me?” she asks lowly, and hopes he says no.

He does not stuff his mouth with bold, brash words, polished to a sheen with righteousness, with refusal. She likes those, the ones that start unyielding, the ones that think that their will can prevail in the face of the Hunt. This one doesn't do that, and for a moment – a leaden, frustrated moment, he shifts and she thinks he might just tell her after all to save his own skin.

It's a falsity of course. They both know an answer is not needed, and an answer will not stop her. But she'll make him choose regardless.

He presses his lips together, the wound on his neck welling up languidly and coating the top of his shirt collar, and clenches his eyes closed in anticipation of some vicious blow. Ever so slightly, his head makes an aborted little left-right shake, and she has the answer she seeks.

She has him a long time. It's hard to keep track, with the song thundering so loudly in her head. And although he definitely opens his mouth to shriek and scream, the sound never twists itself into an answer. A place or a name, anything that would placate her enough to stop.

It is as she's tenderising the skin of his stomach with her fists that she hears it; something upstairs rolls, drops, rattling and clunking to the floor.

She stops immediately. Hackles up. Tunes out the noise of the prey beneath her, a wet whistling gargle through a ruined throat, the creak that snapped bones make as they rub against the other, the tectonic plates of his breaking-down body. Listens at the house-sounds of the silence remaining– the drone of the boiler system, the throb of blood under her fingers. The scampering footsteps of someone on the floor above them.

She bolts. Taking the stairs with ease, on all fours, the sound pounding loud as she scatters into the master bedroom. She is disappointed to find it empty. She moves to a crouch, eyes flickering dismissively over the meaningless rubbish of the room; the dog-eared books towering on one bedside table, cluttered with spare change, pencil nubs, a phone plugged in to charge, flashing with a missed message. The other bedside table is spotless. No evidence of occupancy, trimmed with a fine fall of dust. One side of the bed is pungent with all the scents that make up a human, a warm, alive sweat-scent, a little dusting of a tasteful cologne. The other side is unsettlingly absent. The scent of nothing, the chill that comes from standing in a snow-bound field as the weather and visibility worsens.

There is a pill-bottle on the floor. Seemingly rolled off and fallen from the bedside table on the left. She picks it up cautiously, but there's no dark secret to it. She's irrationally annoyed to have been pulled away from the delights waiting for her downstairs by such a distraction.

The door behind her swings. It's well-oiled, doesn't complain with a dry sound, but she catches the motion of it in the corner of her eye, whirls around to nothing.

Another pad of footsteps, another click as the latch of another door is raised.

She knows even as she gets there that the room will be empty. A large bathroom, pungent with the intermixing scents of shower gels and colognes and skin-care products. It stuffs up in her nose, makes her shake herself with the headiness of it, grumble in her throat.

The tap drips loud. The cord for the light swings, recently pulled.

Behind her, moving away, more creaking footsteps.

She hears the body below her whimper and jerk, and she's been away too long, chasing ghosts and shadows.

The sensation that she's being played with suddenly rises high and rushing within her.

When she hares to the bottom of the stairwell, bounding into the living room, her prey has gone. Blood going rusty in the strands of the carpet, the shattered laptop still with its smashed face and keys spilled out onto the carpet.

The air is funny. Flat, like a house un-lived in, abandoned or empty.

There is someone in the room.

There's no pulse or swish of motion, there is nothing visible, but there is someone _there_, she knows, and she snarls _show yourself_, and she is angry now, raging now with a mouthful of sharp points, to be so played, to have had the upper hand taken from her so quickly.

And then, not even appearing between blinks, just all of a sudden present, there is a man standing there.

Tall, stocky without being imposing. A lodestone of a human being, broad-shouldered, a solid stance, and he immediately presents more of a challenge than the archivist she's been sharpening her nails on. Middle-aged, she'd guess, but treated badly for it. His skin has taken the weather-beaten knocks of salty winds and a browning sun, and it ages him up even without the white haphazard curls of his hair.

She can barely look at him properly. He makes up a faded image, like being seen through smudged glasses, and parts of him dip and resurface out of translucence. A bloated, dense fog has followed him in, and he stands amidst it, not worried or arrogant, a greatcoat tussling his ankles, a thick cable-knit jumper that appears inexpertly hand-knitted.

His eyes are a sharp grey and they watch her. He isn't moved to speak, and she dislikes the imbalance of this.

“Where is he then?” she growls, although from the tang of salt in the air she can guess. She doesn't move forward to challenge him; for the first time since she has arrived, there is a lesson of caution enacted in her motions. The Lukases were a known quantity. But no one is quite sure how this new Avatar plays their games.

“Safe,” the interloper replies. Calmly. Their voice softer than she was expecting. Echoing faintly, a ringing mimicking sound, bouncing off the space and making it seem bigger.

He doesn't say anything else. His image wavering like a paused video. A placid look on his face, the genial empty smile that you give strangers.

“Didn't think you'd come when he beckoned,” she says, wanting the silence broken, and he tilts his head.

“Jon didn't call me,” he replies. “Not in the way you think. This is my domain, I'm not stupid enough to take my gaze from it.”

“The archivist was my prize,” she says, bolder, allowing the ribbed edges of a snarl in her words, and her curving hands are beginning to crack and dry with rusty streaks of blood from a creature not yet dead and she feels cheated out of her spoils.

“You came here for both of us,” he says matter of factly, unruffled, almost off-hand.

“Yes,” she replies with a smile. “I was looking forward to trapping you somehow, eventually. But Sims turned out to be such diverting entertainment.” She runs a tongue over her teeth, and her fists clench, flex. “And you took him from me.”

The house-sounds of this room have spluttered out. The boiler, the radiators, the background hum of electricals and the settling sound of the foundations shifting; they've been tuned out, replaced by an unhurried sea swell.

“He was not yours to take,” the Avatar says, and the fog around her is fattening, growing dense like overgrowth before her eyes. The echo in his voice strengthens. His calm tone is beginning to trickle from his voice, thawing into a flat and furious chill. “He was not yours to touch.”

She feels the fog begin to clamp around her, and she reacts. Snarls, surging forward, wanting to feel the sound of his scream vibrating under her tongue as she severs the cords in his throat.

He redacts himself from the world around them. Fog thickens around her, rising up like a sea-front, slowing her like striding through sand. She slashes out, talons curved, and the ground beneath her gives way from matted carpet to a kicked up gouge where her shoes have dug into sand.

“As if the Lonely needs another damaged good to devour,” she sneers at the empty expanse around her. Turning this way, that, greeted on all sides by the density of nothing. She can no longer see the framed photos on the fireplace mantle, the knick-knacks scavenged from holidays and charity shops, the collection of snow globes, souvenir spoons, books on poetry that are all bundled into whatever nook they will fit in. “His fear is mature – his god fed on him more than you've ever done, but it lingers on the tongue. You can't keep a prize like that to yourself. A live-in sacrifice was always going to be an easy mark for another.”

“Oh,” echoes back the voice of the man, and his image is off in the distance, wavy like a heat distortion, further along the beach; her legs sink in the sand as she tries to move, and she hisses in frustration and tugs them free from the sucking ground, moving herself laboriously towards him. “You don't... you don't get it. That's what you think?”

He makes a tsk noise, like he's mildly irritated, and it's the most human sound she's heard from him. The fog around her is beginning to entwine around her upper legs, arms, holding her fast, and she's beginning to struggle for real now, snapping and snarling and lashing out, but it's a tighter hold than she would have expected.

“He came to _me_. Willingly. I didn't make him do anything. Jon's always... he's always been very independent. He severed himself from his god and offered himself up, and the man I was before... well, I didn't want him dead. The Lonely wanted him as a reward, another god's chosen stolen from them, but I made sure to get him first. As... well, an acolyte if you like. And we took the appropriate steps, to keep us both safe and tethered to the other.”

The squeeze is a breathless hold. She scores her talons against the blank mass but it squanders itself around her impact before crawling back in. She cannot feel the sand under her feet, see the horizon of cold sky and dead sea. She squirms and yowls and hisses but gains no ground.

“And now you're here,” the voice of the Avatar says, far off, unseen. “And you spilled blood in my sanctuary, desecrated my temple. You came into my _home._ How stupid are you?”

The singing of the blood is quietening, then murmuring, and she cries aloud as it goes silent. Leaves her empty and alone, no _pack_ no _blood_ just the silence and the touch of her god draining from her pores.

He stands before her, the greatcoat unmoving around him, untouched by wind or motion. His eyes are all grey and she looks into them and sees _nothing_. No contempt, no pity, no mercy. Nothing but a colour-less expanse of nothing.

“_Leave_,” he says, low and quiet and commanding.

She feels the snow-blind embrace of another god, feels the world around her evacuate itself of noise and sound and sense and song before the Lonely clamps its jaws around her to feast.

The man in the greatcoat breathes in. Feeling suddenly full.

The beach fades away, and this man who is not quite a ghost comes back. For a moment, he stands back in a living room still shell-shock by the recent violence. His image in flux like a sea squall, shrouded and matted with too much space. He drops out of the room then like walking through a door, and when he comes back, a few inches to the left, he's carrying a shivering, frost-bitten keepsake which he sets gently back down on the floor, murmuring soft platitudes.

The thing he is – for a moment of course, but moments ravel out for him, ribbons of disconnect, of stretch, of hours where a minute doesn't tick – observes the man he's brought back from his realm. Alone now, bound painfully, bloody bruising blooming painfully over his face, under his clothes. He is panting in breathes that can be seen in the chill of the room, eyes clenched shut, his entire body snared like an unsprung trap, waiting for the hunter to come back, another pain to be inflicted. His lips are indented with blood where he's bitten his lips close to keep his secrets in his mouth.

The thing he is sees desecration upon his temple.

The thing he was moves his body to kneeling. Becalmed in his gestures although there is panic making his heart flutter as a hummingbird. He gives a slow sedate touch to the shoulder that has the man flinch, curl up, face creasing in expected agonies.

When Martin speaks, his voice through the static has a shiver of humanity to it.

“Jon,” Martin says, and it's both question and request. “Jon, I came. You're …. you're going to be alright.”

Jon is not alright. He was terrorised and battered and someone came into their _home_ and there is blood on their carpet and he nearly wasn't fast enough, and everything in Martin is a blanketing urge to close them both off, to drag the blanketing fog closer.

Jon shivers and shakes and now is not the time for detachment.

Martin has a knife in an inner pocket of his coat, tucked away from the elements. It is engraved with his initials, a fine antique silver thing that was a wedding gift from his husband, a twin to the switch-blade cast off to one side of the room. (_be safe_, his groom had asked of him, _return home to me_). He uses its honed blade to sever the wrist-bindings holding his shoulders painfully back. The rope is tough, soaked, drying and flaking with blood. It sticks and rips as he peels it off, and Jon cries out, and Martin can do nothing but repeat his platitudes, brush hair back from his face.

It has been months. This is not the homecoming Martin had envisioned.

He takes off his bulky greatcoat, throwing it over Jon to try and stop the shivering. He notices for the first time the indents of teeth around his throat, at the meat of his shoulder, the grooves of nails that mar his skin. The Lonely does not get attached. But the Avatar was a man once, with all the pettinesses and loyalties that affords him, and there's enough of his humanity bound like a lamplight in fog to rail in fury that his space was invaded, his peace was disturbed, was _harmed_, that he had not felt the burn in his chest and the blossoming agonies repeated like dulled mimicry on his own skin until through the fog he saw he was dripping blood from his nose onto his sleeves. That he had not known he was needed fast enough.

“The Hunter...” Jon's voice creaks out of him as a groan.

“Gone,” Martin replies firmly. Neither of them need to clarify anything there.

“Did she...” Jon stammers and slurs through wet lips. “She didn't hurt...?”

“I'm not the one you should be worrying about,” Martin says, and his voice rucks up with an apology as he bundles Jon into his arms. Jon cries out in pain, the movement pulling at injuries, but he quietens against Martin's chest, his unbroken fingers closing to embed themselves into the weave of the jumper. It was a Christmas gift, from years ago. An early attempt, and Jon has since improved his technique; this fledging offering has a few dropped stitches, is getting some holes at the bottom that let the damp air in, but Martin rarely takes it off when he has to be away.

“Why didn't you tell her?” Martin says, ever so quietly, and it's almost not a question he voices.

Jon's uninjured hand pats Martin's arm dazedly and it takes a while for him to find the air to reply.

“You know why,” he says, as though that is an answer, and maybe it is for him.

Jon needs a hospital. The cold of Martin's skin is beginning to seep into him.

“I'll take you,” Martin says. “To a hospital. It'll be faster.”

The certainty allows him to tamp down the panic. Heaving himself up to standing, his hands, rope-rough and sturdy with a hint of cording muscle, anchor the weight of the slighter man against his chest.

Jon nods. A half-delirious gesture, detached from the conversation, distracted by the visitation of injuries, the confusion of sudden movement, and Martin shakes him a little.

“_Jon,_” he says, and there's a chip in the glazing of his confidence. “Jon, can you do it? Can you make the journey?”

The Lonely is no place for Jon. It's a seductive muting quiet even now, a siren song that will promise _quiet_ and _painless_ and _safe_, a__nd it will not hesitate to draw him in and keep him there. The fact that he is with Martin might not help, not now, not when Martin is a blurring duality of non-person, forgetting every lesson from where he draws his power – the closer Jon is, the more the man that was and maybe still is Martin Blackwood is allowed to worry and fret and__ _care_, t__he harder it is for him to protect him in that enduring wasteland. They will have to travel fast.

Jon pats his arm clumsily.

“I have you,” he says.

_ That has not kept you safe, _Martin thinks, but he doesn't have the time for recriminations.

“Talk to me,” Martin insists. “I know it's hard, and I know you're hurting, but you – you need to talk to me. Keep yourself here.”

The room is washed away by the touch of an encompassing mist. And although it hurts him, Jon talks. Eyes clenched shut, face half buried into Martin's shoulder, forcing the words out of bloody teeth, Martin prompting him when his sentences stumble in his throat, when he trails off into a silence__, _come on chatterbox, _he says__, __his legs tiring the further they walk and the more his own fears sap at his strength, _tell me more__,_ __and Jon does not deny him.

He talks about the things he has done while Martin's been away, about the changes he has made to their home that he wanted to show him when he got back. His voice cracks in agony as his punctured hand is jostled, and he keens with a shattered noise, _let me rest Martin, just a minute, give me a minute,_ and it takes all of Martin's coldness to push him, to unrelentingly keep him present and away from the luring peaceful quiet of the landscape; _come on, Jon, come on, tell me about the garden. Tell me about your research. Tell me about the life you've been living when I can't be there. _

And Jon is tired but he rallies as best he can. He pants his way through anecdote and story and rambling recollection. With blood-damp lips, he jokes about having to reorganise the snowglobes that Martin keeps bringing back__ – _you're going to have to stop, h-ah-honestly, we're running out of room_ – __and the blood is bubbling over his lips, and Martin walks faster and feels the weight of the gift he was indeed going to give in one of his many pockets; _bad time to tell you I got you another one then? Anchorage. Little gift-shop while I was near civilisation_ and Jon's choked snort of laughter, his little__ 'I knew it' __bounces in the empty and makes it a little smaller.

_ Describe it to me,_ Jon asks, and so Martin does.

“I knew you'd come” Jon says wearily after a while.

“Liar,” Martin says.

Jon pauses, sucks in a few more stringy breathes.

“I knew,” he repeats firmly. “that you'd come.”

“I was late,” Martin says, and it's bitter and angry, and the cold around them both deepens.

“You came,” Jon repeats again, and it's here he droops into unconsciousness, his whole weight in Martin's arms, his strings cut. Martin grips him tighter, trudges on through the sand.

They get to A&E soon. Martin walks them out of the Lonely and through the doors unseen and unfolds his grip, ever so gently. Leaving Jon on an empty stretcher in a corridor for the moment unpopulated, pulling an emergency cord to alert nearby staff. Brushing a soft kiss to his forehead, noting the new lines that have sprung up around his eyes while he's been away, a recent haircut already starting to grow over his ears.__ _I'll be back,_ __he promises, and departs as easily as he arrived.

The Hunter has not been the first to come after either of them, but she's gotten the closest. And the thing that Martin is now is not jealous but it remembers the sense of it, the way protectiveness can slip over into something else.

There's no way to stop them all of course. But the Avatar of the Lonely can send a message. Destruction is more Desolation than Lonely, but he's sure there's enough intersect for his god not to mind.

**Author's Note:**

> TWs for: home break-in, stalking, torture, violent assault, blood


End file.
